The European Commission announced on 18 May 2026 that it had selected Swedish investment firm EQT to manage the new Scaleup Europe Fund, a vehicle with a target size of €5 billion designed to back the continent's most promising technology companies at the growth stage. The fund will invest across th

On 15 May 2026, the FCA and Bank of England published something the market has been waiting for. Not a pilot. Not a sandbox update. A shared vision — and a roadmap.

18 May 2026 | Category: LAW, REGULATION, POLICY

The venture capital industry runs on reputation. Relationships are currency. Warm introductions open doors that cold calls cannot. And dissent about how the system works can be career-limiting in an industry small enough for word to travel fast.

For those watching institutional asset management move onchain, the partnership announced on 12 May 2026 between Payward and Franklin Templeton carries weight that goes beyond a standard industry announcement. This is a $1.6 trillion global asset manager with a ten-year head start in tokenised finan

Only around 14% of UK angel investors are women. That figure has not shifted meaningfully in years, and it matters because the composition of the investor base directly shapes who gets funded. Female angel investors are significantly more likely to deploy capital into female-founded businesses. If t

On 6 May 2026, Chainlink, Apex Group, Bluprynt and Hacken announced the successful completion of the Bermuda Monetary Authority's Embedded Supervision Solution. The pilot demonstrated, for the first time at live scale, that regulatory compliance rules can be built directly into digital asset transac

The numbers are in for Q1 2026, and the headline story is straightforward: UK equity investment is holding steady at roughly £6 billion per quarter, the UK remains Europe's dominant destination for venture capital, and the market is, on the surface, healthy.

On 8 May 2026, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook delivered a speech at the Central Bank of West African States conference in Dakar, Senegal, that covered tokenisation in terms usually reserved for established financial market infrastructure. She confirmed that tokenised assets in the United States

A freedom of information request that nobody should have needed to file found that 81 per cent of the assessors for Innovate UK's Women in Innovation programme were male. Not a percentage from an anonymous third-party study. The publicly funded body specifically designed to support female founders w

The Arrangement OKX — one of the world's largest crypto exchanges by derivatives volume — has integrated BlackRock's BUIDL fund as eligible margin collateral for institutional clients. Standard Chartered acts as custodian. This is the first time a globally systemically important bank (G-SIB) has served in a custodial role in an arrangement of this kind.

Tradeweb's Q1 2026 earnings call, held on 29 April, marks a different kind of moment. The platform reported $10 million in quarterly revenue directly attributed to commercial activity on the Canton Network — the distributed ledger infrastructure purpose-built for institutional digital asset deployment. That is not a pilot. That is a revenue line. What Tradeweb Reported Tradeweb Markets, which operates one of the world's largest electronic fixed income and derivatives tr

What Morgan Stanley Has Announced. In mid-April 2026, Morgan Stanley named tokenisation of real-world assets "the next major step for upgrading financial infrastructure" and identified it as a top global business focus. The firm is targeting the second half of 2026 to launch a dedicated institutional digital wallet — a product that would allow its institutional clients to hold, transact, and receive tokenised RWAs directly within Morgan Stanley's existing wealth management i

Lise received authorisation from French regulator AMF in late 2025, becoming the first institution in Europe licensed to operate a fully tokenised equity exchange. Unlike hybrid models that tokenise existing securities while keeping legacy infrastructure in place, Lise has built a single on-chain system that combines issuance, trading, settlement, and share registry. There is no parallel paper record, no T+2 clearing cycle, no intermediary custodian between the exchange and t

What Is Being Said, and By Whom On 2 April 2026, the International Monetary Fund published a note describing tokenisation as a fundamental reconfiguration of financial architecture, not an incremental improvement to existing systems. At Davos in January, BlackRock's Larry Fink told the World Economic Forum that tokenisation is necessary and that markets need to move rapidly. In a survey published in March by Funds Europe and CACEIS, more than 60 per cent of asset managers sa

The Old Infrastructure Is Building the New One. That Is the Point. Two pieces of market structure news from the same week, neither individually dramatic, together illustrate something important about how tokenisation actually enters the financial mainstream. What Happened On 31 March 2026, DTCC launched a new business line, DTCC Digital Asset Solutions, with a mandate to tokenise assets currently held in custody by its depository arm, DTC. On the same day, Apex Group anno

The world of digital assets has seen rapid growth over the past decade, attracting a wide range of investors from retail traders to large institutions. Yet, this growth has not come without challenges. One of the most significant factors shaping investor behaviour in this space is regulatory change. As governments and regulatory bodies around the world adjust their stance on digital assets, investor adoption patterns shift accordingly. Understanding how regulatory changes inf

The British Business Bank recently announced that the British Growth Partnership Fund I has reached its first close with £200 million raised. This fund marks a significant moment as it brings pension money into UK startups, a move that has long been discussed but rarely executed at this scale. The question many are asking is whether this is a one-time effort or the start of a lasting change in how UK pension schemes invest in venture capital. Why Pension Money Matters for UK

UK Investors Left Out as Fundrise and Kraken Launch Onchain VCX Fund for Global Access. The tokenisation of venture capital funds is reshaping how investors access private markets. Recently, Fundrise and Kraken’s xStocks platform introduced an onchain version of the Fundrise Innovation Fund (NYSE: VCX), enabling global investors to trade a token representing shares in this venture capital vehicle. This development marks a significant milestone in the integration of traditiona

For many years, UK startup founders have faced a persistent challenge: how to offer investors a clear exit strategy if their company never goes public. On 24 March 2026, the UK made a significant move to address this issue with the first trade completed under the PISCES framework. This new private share market opens fresh opportunities for founders, employees, and early investors to access liquidity without relying solely on an IPO.